After years of minimalist, clear wine glasses, tumblers and dishes, colourful glassware is making a comeback. Brightly hued glass pieces such as purple goblets from the 1970s and coral-pink 1930s candlesticks have seen sales rise 30% since last year, according to Narchie, an app for buying and selling vintage homeware.
And on the high street, John Lewis says that sales of drinkware in shades of damson, amber and cobalt have risen 71% on figures from the same week last year. The department store’s Confetti range – a modern collection decorated with flecks of colour – has gone up by 20%.
It’s a similar story at Ikea. “Customers are daring to introduce new energy and shades into their table settings,” says Paul Kinnen, home furnishing business leader for kitchens at the Swedish furniture retailer.
If you want to blow the Christmas budget on some coloured glass, Danish designer Helle Mardahl will do you some magical cocktail glasses and dishes that come in shades such as blueberry ice-cream and caramel and do indeed look good enough to eat. On Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle platform, there are tumblers and stem glasses in rose and sand.
Glass tableware in rainbow colours is a simple way to bring some pizzazz to a dinner table – especially for festive parties. Tablescaping – the art of creating ornate and traditional centrepieces and place settings of cutlery, plates and glassware – has been on trend in recent years. Coordinating colour and pattern is key to a good table, and coloured tumblers have become common on intricate place settings. Interest in maximalist interiors is also on the up, and adding colourful glassware to a table is something even the laziest of entertainers can manage.
This, however, is just the latest iteration of colourful glass over the centuries. Many centuries, in fact.
“Coloured glass goes back to the bronze age,” says Dr Sally Cottam, secretary for the Association for the History of Glass. “Well, glass is naturally coloured a bluish green and you decolourise it using different compounds. In the Augustan period, you had vessels in every colour of the rainbow – some really quite tasteless, but fabulous in their own way. Then the Romans went crazy for colourless glass in the later first century. It became the norm, probably in part because the level of glass production increased and also because it lets you show off the colour of your wine.”
And decorative glass has never completely disappeared. Enamelled glass was very popular in the Islamic world; the Venetians rediscovered Roman polychromatic glass in the 15th century and the Victorians also loved it – “particularly cranberry and Bristol blue”, according to Cottam. The 1960s ushered in colourful patterned glassware to complement the vivid neons and primary colours of pop art and psychedelia.
While the latest revival is part of a trend for investing in home interiors and entertaining at home rather than going out, it comes at a time when there is a growing interest in the craft of glassmaking.
The Crafts Council’s 2022 report, The Market for Craft, found that the number of collectors likely to have bought glasswork in the last two years had jumped from 24% to 41%.
A Bristol-based glassmaker has revived the Bristol Green shade, manufacturing it in the city for the first time in 200 years. This colour is famous in Europe and North America, and is the origin of the traditional dark green wine bottle. When wine-makers started using clear bottles, Bristol lost its glassmaking industry.
There is also a forthcoming exhibition celebrating the art and history of glass, which opens in January 2024 at Two Temple Place in London. The Glass Heart: Art, Industry & Collaboration features work from Britain’s industrial glass history as well as the work of modern artists such as Sam Herman and Chris Day.
Award-winning designer Tom Dixon’s new collection of tableware and vases, called Bump, uses borosilicate – better known as lab glass, which is strong and withstands heat – and comes in a calming emerald green.
“Made from easily available, unlimited materials and completely recyclable, glass has served us for millennia,” says Dixon. “It is so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget how extraordinary it is as a material, as packaging, as a precious object.”
